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Radeon OpenGL 2.0 support

09-22-2009, 05:27 PM

IIRC the latest Mesa already supports OpenGL 2.0. Is there any ETA as to when ATI radeon and radeonhd driver will support openGL 2.0? It's becoming a real PITA not being able to have shaders in 3D with this card (R500, so no fglrx, no GLSL).

Just for clarification, the current driver *does* support shaders and most of the games running on them are using shaders. What they don't support is GLSL - only the ARB_vp/fp shader language. The changes to support GLSL and OpenGL 2.0 will mostly be made in the mesa drivers, not radeon/radeonhd.

Availability of kernel modesetting (actually the GEM/TTM memory manager that comes with kernel modesetting) was a pre-requisite for some of the GL 2.0 functions, and also a pre-requisite for the Gallium3D drivers which will be the most likely path to GL 2.0. Now that KMS/GEM/TTM are available in the kernel tree, work on Gallium3D is starting to ramp up.

It's probably a bit early to make schedule estimates... maybe check back in a month.

Comment

There is no GLSL yet, but I'm working on it as time permits. However, I also want to push the Gallium driver r300g which has some catching up to do, so that slows things down a little.

I can't give you a good timeframe, unfortunately. It might happen in Mesa 7.7 or not, it's not clear at the moment.

Thanks for the info. I highly value your work on the OSS drivers so don't get me wrong, it's just that I'm getting a bit frustrated by not being able to use a 2 year old gfx card on linux properly (especially now since I got invited to Heroes of Newerth beta ).

Anyways, if you need a tester for R500 (Mobility X1600) give me a PM. I got some simple as well as more complicated GLSL stuff here.

Comment

For some trivial to not that complicated GLSL Mesa offers some tests but I'm sure your code would be plenty useful for testing. (especially so if it's opensource and other people can download the source and compile it too) That is, in the days when GLSL support will be in the drivers.

Comment

There was some discussion a while back about whether it made sense to try enabling GLSL before the flow control instructions were fully implemented in the driver, since there seemed to be a number of apps which required GLSL but which didn't actually use any shader functions which were not already handled by the ARB_FP/VP support.

I'm not sure where that discussion ended but it might be worth reviving. It would not affect the need to get to GL 2.x support but might make it possible to provide support more quickly for a number of GLSL-only applications.

I guess what we really need is an instrumentation layer that dumps out a summary of all the capabilities used by the application.

Comment

To test the Gallium drivers, you first need to enable building them (--enable-gallium-radeon --with-state-trackers=dri,glx). Then the build system provides a radeon_dri.so, which should be renamed or linked to as r300_dri.so from some other directory. Then you can set the LIBGL_DRIVERS_DIR environment variable to test the driver for specific applications only.